I don’t really blame the recipe site that includes how Daniel grew up with their parents searching the river banks of rural New York State for the best wild blueberries, because that’s the only way they show up in a world sorted by shitty algorithms. There’s still a recipe at the bottom of the page, for free.
But I do blame, every single day, the people who make mindless content just to serve ads.
The other day I shit you not I googled how to set a specific Chron schedule, and there was a webpage for it. They had a page for every chron schedule permutation. If you google chron schedule for X hours Y days, Z, you’ll find them. Of course there were ads on the page and it has almost useless, but they exploded their content for views.
But now imagine that Google indexes that, and it becomes costlier for Google to provide a better experience to the user because there’s so much garbage content to index and rank. They also serve ads, so Google actually makes more money showing this trash, thus incentivizing them not to look too closely at the gift horses mouth.